What we talk when we talk about birds

Speranza

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"[edit]

Main Characters[edit]

Mel McGinnis is a 45-year-old cardiologist married to Teresa, also known as Terri.

They live together in Albuquerque.

The narrator describes Mel as tall and rangy with curly soft hair and Teresa (who is Mel's second wife) as bone-thin with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair.

Mel and Terri have two friends named Nick and Laura.

Nick is 38 years old and is the narrator of the story.

Laura is 35, married to Nick, and works as a legal secretary.

They are a group of friends.

The story is about four friends—Mel, Teresa (Terri), Laura, and Nick.

The setting is Mel's house, around a table with a bucket of ice in the middle.

A bottle of gin is inside it.

They soon start to talk about love (as the title suggests).

Terri has had an abusive relationship.

The abuse, she says, derives from love.

Ed, Terri's former abusive boyfriend, "loved her so much he tried to kill her."

Ed would beat Terri.

He dragged her around the living room by her ankles knocking her into things along the way.

Terri believed that Ed loved her and his abuse was his way of showing it.

No matter what Terri said, Mel refused to believe that was "love".

Ed also stalked Mel and Terri and called Mel at work with threatening messages.

At one point, Mel was so scared he bought a gun and made out a will.

Mel even wrote to his brother in California, saying that "if something happened to him" to look for Ed.

Terri's abusive boyfriend eventually committed suicide after two attempts (as Terri sees it, another act of love).

Ed's first attempt at suicide was when Terri had left him.

Ed had drunk rat poison, but was rushed to the hospital where he was saved.

In Ed's second, successful attempt he shot himself in the mouth.

Someone heard the shot from Ed's room and called the manager.

Terri and Mel argued about whether she could be in the room with him when he died.

Terri won and was with Ed as he died; as Terri put it, "He never came up out of it."


Soon afterward, Mel begins a story about an elderly couple struck by a drunk driver, a teenager who was pronounced dead at the scene.

The couple survived the car accident because they were wearing seat belts.

Mel was called into the hospital that night just as he sat down to dinner.

Once he arrived, he saw how badly the elderly couple had been injured.

He said that they had "multiple fractures, internal injuries, hemorrhaging, contusions, and lacerations."^[3]

The couple were in casts and bandages from head to toe.

Mel's point in telling the story was the husband's upset when the couple was moved into the intensive care unit.

Mel would visit the couple daily, and when he put his ear to the husband's mouth-hole, the latter told Mel he was upset because he could not see his wife through his eye-holes.

Mel would stray from the topic with more talk about Ed, his personal thoughts about love, hatred toward his ex-wife, and life as a knight.

Mel felt even though one loves a person, if something were to happen to them, the survivor would grieve but love again.

After finishing the second bottle of gin, the couples discuss going to dinner, but no one makes any moves to proceed with their plans.